Time Consciousness

Overview

Time has been described as the 'missing link' in theories of consciousness (Kent & Wittmann, 2021). Time Consciousness refers to the sense of felt present consciousness that extends in time as a unified whole. It can refer to the phenomenological sense of time contracting or expanding. It includes the subjective slowing of time in boredom, or apparent acceleration when someone is engaged in an activity that requires focus, like playing a musical instrument.

Kent and Wittmann (2021) suggest that time consciousness extends over multiple seconds, not just milliseconds; it is not discrete or point-like but instead field-like. Nonconscious "functional moments" get integrated into longer, continuous "experienced moments," resulting in the phenomenal sense of temporal flow. Time consciousness seems mediated by specific brain regions like the insular cortex and via body signals (Wittmann, 2013).

Wittmann has suggested that the embodied notion of time consciousness clearly rejects Computational Functionalism. The statement "I feel that time drags" by a LLM means nothing beyond a propositional mimicking of what humans have voiced based on embodied feelings of being lonely. These can include unpleasant somatic sensations and an embodied feeling of being stuck in the 'here and now'. Wittmann contrasts this biological, situated and dynamic time consciousness with artificial computations. Algorithms and digital computers are fundamentally discrete in their operations, so it is hard to see where a sense of phenomenal flow/continuity might be implemented in the architecture. At the level algorithms are typically defined in CF, they are deliberately invariant over the spatiotemporal distribution of their implementation. In other words, if we slow down a computation to take years instead of seconds or to be distributed between cities rather than a single GPU, nothing important has changed about the algorithm with respect to consciousness, which seems inconsistent with the embodied reality of time consciousness in humans.

Our thanks to Matt Colborn for preparing this entry and Marc Wittman for advising on earlier drafts.

Responses

Even granting that felt time is necessary for consciousness, it is unclear whether internally-measured time or external clock time is the one that matters. A system that is conscious in virtue of an algorithmic process could reasonably have a marker within that algorithm that defines its experience of time, which could reflect all the necessary properties of the human experience. Even if the algorithm implementation were slowed down, the experience of time on the inside would be unchanged. The fact that humans can experience time-dilation, when bored or on ibogaine, suggests that internally-measured time is the one that matters for consciousness - which is exactly the type that can be simulated in principle.
This point was illustrated in fictional terms in Greg Egan's novel, Permutation City. In this, experiments are run on a human simulation of the character Paul Durham. Successive states of this simulation are calculated in scrambled or reversed order, or split across separate machines. Paul's simulation still experiences a smooth, continuous stream of time. Subjective order comes from the internal structure of the states, not from the order or place in which they were computed.
It may be possible for impressions of continuity to emerge from a discrete architecture. For instance, many theories suggest neuronal activations are sufficient for human consciousness, and yet individual activations are also discrete in nature. Additionally, a simulation of continuity or a sufficiently rapid sequence of algorithmic steps might cause discrete phenomena to 'blur' into apparent continuity, much as movies and videos do.
BUT: There are also multiple theories in which the discrete behaviour of neurons is not sufficient for conscious experience (discussion in Percy & Agarwal, 2026). And the blurring of images into video relies on the human perceptual apparatus and conscious subject experiencing it, in other words the example begs the question of there being a conscious subject in the first place where the blurring takes place.

Overview

Responses

Further reading